Sexual Assault Justice Looks Different On TV Drama Than On TV News
It was unfortunate that CBS’s new cop drama Tommy happened to reach its #metoo-rooted episode just as producer Harvey Weinstein was being convicted in a real-life courtroom on several charges of sexual harassment and assault.
It’s not that Tommy shouldn’t have tackled the subject, as numerous TV dramas and documentaries have done.
The problem lay more in the timing, because just as the Weinstein case was reminding us how complex the whole ugly subject can become, the CBS drama was suggesting that with a little nudge from law enforcement, justice can be relatively quick and clean.
Tommy is a “procedural,” CBS’s go-to drama genre, wherein shows raise a crisis and resolve it by the end of the hour, that is, 42–43 minutes of screen time.
Tommy stars the always-marvelous Edie Falco as Abigail “Tommy” Thomas, a New Yorker who has just been named the first female chief of the Los Angeles Police Department.
In this episode, a famous Hollywood producer is found dead during a party in his honor. Tara, a young woman on the catering staff, becomes the prime suspect because she had been seen bringing him a drink.
Backstory here: Ten years earlier, Tommy had been sexually assaulted by a superior police officer in New York. She broke his nose and while the truth more or less sort of came out, it short-circuited her career there.
So a simpatico Tommy talks to Tara and convinces her to admit that several years earlier, the producer had raped her. When she reported it to her boss, she was fired and told if she said anything, she would never work in this town again.
When she unexpectedly saw the producer at this party, she told Tommy, she tried to confront him. He responded by trying to rape her again. She hit him with the nearest heavy object, which killed him.
This sets up a potential standoff, unless her old boss drops the coverup and admits she had reported the earlier assault.
Tommy sends a couple of police officers to visit him and warn him his own reputation could take a hit if he didn’t ‘fess up.
So he does. Then when Tara appears in court for the start of her trial, five other women who were also assaulted by the producer and had been bullied into silence stand up in the back row of the courtroom. The prosecutor gulps and asks that all charges against Tara be dropped.
The truth comes out. Justice is served. Forty-two minutes to a clean win.
If only.
And now we return you to our regular programming, real life.
Few defendants in recent judicial history have looked as guilty as Harvey Weinstein. Before his trial, dozens of credible women had detailed experiences that made readers or listeners want to take a scalding hot shower.
But many of those alleged incidents were not prosecutable. They had timed out. There was insufficient corroboration.
When Weinstein finally went to trial on a handful of charges, the women who testified against him had to detail his conduct in humiliating detail and explain why they didn’t turn him in at the time. The women then had to hear Weinstein’s attorney turn it around on them, telling the jury they were only looking for publicity to revive their dead careers.
Welcome to a world where women get to be victimized twice.
Still, it’s true that some #metoo accusations, like all powerful weapons, have been misused. There are degrees of bad behavior, and while none are acceptable, they call for proportionate degrees of sanction.
If nothing else, overstated accusations make it more difficult to punish the hard-core predators. Discarding due process and vaulting straight to “guilty as accused” ill-serves everyone, including those for whom it would be temporarily expedient.
That’s why Harvey Weinstein’s fate was decided in a courtroom, by a conflicted jury, and not by the avalanche of reports, however appalling, in the media.
Sadly, some level of sexual harassment has long been embedded in almost all areas of American life controlled by men, which is almost all of them.
By shining a light on this shameful tradition, the #metoo movement can help to start cutting it back.
Progress comes, however, at a steep price. Women who speak up, whether it’s to their boss in a small office or in a nationally televised congressional hearing, risk being challenged, ridiculed and often themselves accused. They’re bullied again. Let’s assume many, many women with honest grievances still feel they’re better off bottling them up.
You can’t call out a TV show for whittling a complex issue down to dramatic shorthand. That’s what episodic TV does. Still, just because of its juxtaposition to a high-profile real-life case, this episode of Tommy wielded a particularly noticeable double-edged blade.
On the one side, it’s not a bad message that victims can speak up and some of the perps will pay.
On the other side, it may spread the fantasy that any of these cases ends quickly and cleanly at a low cost.
